Sunday, January 20, 2013

Double-edged Swords

I have a specific reason for the title of this post. However, when I thought up the title, it reminded me of a humorous misunderstanding I once had. When I fist started role playing with the LBBs art was scarce. Our imaginations did almost all the "heavy lifting", sometimes with certain inaccuracies. For me, one such was the two-handed swords. For some reason, in my mind, I saw the two-hander as having a grip on each end of the blade, kind of like bicycle handlebars, only straighter and sharper. I could not understand for the life of me how someone would use one or why they would even want to. Anyway, I still get a smile whenever I think of that.

So, on with the business at hand. Back at the end of October I was hired as a temporary driver at FedEx. Once the Christmas rush had passed, I was one of three temps that were offered permanent routes. This is a great job, but I am on it between 10-12 hours per day, usually closer to 12. That leaves very little time for gaming (or blogging about it). Thus we approach the relevant conundrum . . .

A simple, but more sparse game, or a more complete game? The sparse game requires less upfront effort to read and understand, but requires more work on the backend, filling in important gaps. The complete game is the opposite: more time upfront reading and taking it in, but less work on my part.

My current interest, as of this weekend, is The Fantasy Trip: In the Labyrinth. It has some pretty cool campaigning rules, while remaining very straight-forward. Advanced Melee/Wizard start to drag on my time, though. So, I have come up with a possible solution.Legends of the Ancient Worldby Dark City Games. It provides the nuts and bolts of the system in a scant 7 pages. I can spend a little mental elbow grease to bolt it onto the campaigning rules in ITL and viola! Simple enough to not give me a time issue, but meaty enough to occupy my over-active mind (I hope).